Little, Brown & Company, 1998
David Foster Wallace was an absolute genius in many respects and a ridiculously talented author who I hadn't gotten around to reading until I finally hauled a dusty Infinite Jest off the shelf last summer (along with a few thousand other readers along for the Infinite Summer experience). Wallace's intricately wrought wordcraft is often mesmerizing (although it can at times be off-putting as well), and I wonder whether such mastery came easy to him or whether he spent countless hours hunched over a desk chain-smoking and reengineering sentences to perfection. He certainly expected a lot of himself and his readers, and he gave a lot in return.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a book of seven essays that Wallace wrote for various publications during the early 1990's, is a mixed bag of compositions. The jewel of the collection is the book's title piece (originally titled "Shipping Out," Harper's, January 1996), for which Harper's magazine sent Wallace on a seven night Caribbean cruise with little to no direction on the story they were seeking. "They say all they want is a sort of really big experiential postcard - go, plow the Caribbean in style, come back, say what you've seen."
David Foster Wallace was an absolute genius in many respects and a ridiculously talented author who I hadn't gotten around to reading until I finally hauled a dusty Infinite Jest off the shelf last summer (along with a few thousand other readers along for the Infinite Summer experience). Wallace's intricately wrought wordcraft is often mesmerizing (although it can at times be off-putting as well), and I wonder whether such mastery came easy to him or whether he spent countless hours hunched over a desk chain-smoking and reengineering sentences to perfection. He certainly expected a lot of himself and his readers, and he gave a lot in return.
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a book of seven essays that Wallace wrote for various publications during the early 1990's, is a mixed bag of compositions. The jewel of the collection is the book's title piece (originally titled "Shipping Out," Harper's, January 1996), for which Harper's magazine sent Wallace on a seven night Caribbean cruise with little to no direction on the story they were seeking. "They say all they want is a sort of really big experiential postcard - go, plow the Caribbean in style, come back, say what you've seen."
Wallace's reportage in this 100-page essay is a sort of literary gonzo journalism. Though an anomaly on the megaliner (a self-confessed semi-agoraphobe who as a child feared the ocean and memorized shark-fatality data), he inserted himself in all of the "managed fun" that the cruise had to offer, comprehensively recording every detail in his evocation of the pampering excesses of such an experience. "A Supposedly Fun Thing" begins with a collage of impressions:
I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21000 poinds of hot fles. I have been addressed as "Mon" in three different nations. I have watched 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide.
I have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21000 poinds of hot fles. I have been addressed as "Mon" in three different nations. I have watched 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide.
This is an extremely funny piece of writing, and much of the humor arises from Wallace's critical take on the cruise's surroundings and experiences, and even more from the characters whom Wallace meets aboard ship and conjures in exquisite description - from his cabin steward, Petra, "she of the dimples and broad candid brow, who always wore a nurse's starched and rustling whites and smelled of the cedary Norwegian disinfectant she swabbed bathrooms down with, and who cleaned my cabin within a centimeter of its life at least ten times a day," to Captain Video, a fellow passenger who "camcords absolutely everything, including meals, empty hallways, endless games of geriatric bridge - even leaping onto Deck 11's raised stage during Pool Party to get the crowd from the musicians' angle. You can tell that the magnetic record of Captain Video's Megacruise experience is going to be this Warholianly dull thing that is exactly as long as the Cruise itself."
The other must-read from A Supposedly Fun Thing is "Getting Away From Already Pretty Much Being Away From It All," ("Ticket to the Fair," Harper's, July 1994) for which Wallace was sent to cover the Illinois State Fair. Once again the author's anamolous insertion into the world of cattlemen, carnies, and car-racing enthusiasts ("What I know about auto racing could be inscribed with a dry Magic Marker on the lip of a Coke bottle.") provides context for incisive and often very milk-spurting-from-your-nostrils funny writing.
Would I recommend this book? Sadly, no. Not one of the other five essays in A Supposedly Fun Thing came close to being as engaging as the two above (caviat: I skipped the David Lynch piece, which I suspect would be fascinating to readers with even a passing interest in the director's work); however, I do eagerly anticipate the opportunity to press copies of the aforementioned essays into the hands of friends yet uninitiated to David Foster Wallace's writing. These are exemplary pieces from an author whose acute observations were rivaled only by his unparalleled ability to express them.
Would I recommend this book? Sadly, no. Not one of the other five essays in A Supposedly Fun Thing came close to being as engaging as the two above (caviat: I skipped the David Lynch piece, which I suspect would be fascinating to readers with even a passing interest in the director's work); however, I do eagerly anticipate the opportunity to press copies of the aforementioned essays into the hands of friends yet uninitiated to David Foster Wallace's writing. These are exemplary pieces from an author whose acute observations were rivaled only by his unparalleled ability to express them.
